Staff Blogs
The DREAM Act Goes Down… Again
By Andrew Grant-Thomas,
A couple of weeks ago the US House of Representativesapproved the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act, better known as the DREAM Act. This past Saturday, almost 10 years after its initial introduction, a minority of Senators used the threat of a filibuster to end all hopes of its passage.
The DREAM Act would allow young immigrants brought into the country illegally before age 16 to stay, apply for permanent residence, and eventually apply for US citizenship. There would be strict conditions. Beneficiaries would have to be younger than 30, have lived in the US five or more years straight, and have earned a GED or high school diploma. If they completed at least two years of college or military service and passed various background checks, they would then be able to apply for permanent resident status.
Read more on the Huffington Post.
Homeownership Should Not Become Impossible Dream
By john a powell and Dedrick Muhammad,
The American Dream of homeownership will be under siege if we take seriously recent government proposals to reform the housing finance market. Government regulators have already taken steps to increase down payments for loans made through Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the Federal Housing Authority, and are also considering mandatory (and arbitrary) down payment requirements. These moves and other recent government proposals could further racialize our housing and credit markets by effectively disqualifying many lower-income borrowers, including a large share of borrowers of color. Together, the impact of these requirements would erase many of the advances in homeownership achieved over the past 40 years.
Homeownership has long enjoyed broad bipartisan support, but different families and communities have experienced homeownership differently. The lingering subprime and foreclosure crisis has brought this truth into stark relief: otherwise-qualified borrowers were steered into subprime loans. At the peak of the subprime lending boom, only 9% of subprime loans went to first-time homebuyers. The majority of subprime loans were equity re-financing loans, many of which ultimately stripped equity (reversed homeownership) in communities of color.
Read more on the Huffington Post.
Are Ohio’s Black and Latino Students Buoyed by a System of Preferences? Not Hardly
By Andrew Grant-Thomas,
The Center for Equal Opportunity (CEO) just released astudy that purports to document “heavy discrimination” against white applicants in undergraduate admissions at the Ohio State University and Miami University. The CEO claims that the schools give varying degrees of preference to students of color, especially African Americans and Latinos, over white applicants with similar test scores and grades.
The CEO report is right in one crucial respect: our state and national education systems harbor terrible inequities that skew sharply along lines of race and ethnicity. But the study authors point an accusatory finger at the wrong place in the educational pipeline and wrongly identify the students who bear the greatest burden of that injustice. In so doing the CEO report is likely to generate heat but shed little light on the critical issue of equal educational opportunity for all Ohio’s children.
Read more on the Huffington Post.
Race and Human Trafficking in the U.S.: Unclear but Undeniable
By Jamaal Bell,
I watch and listen to the advocacy of human trafficking at rallies, on web sites, in government reports and NGO reports. The research and statistics on human trafficking in America are ambiguous, especially in relation to race and ethnicity. We need to explicitly recognize the connections between trafficking, poverty, migration, gender, racism and racial discrimination to adequately battle and destroy human trafficking in the U.S.
Trafficking persons is inherently discriminatory. Since an overwhelming majority of trafficked persons are women, trafficking in most circles is usually considered a gender issue, especially in the United States (majority of trafficking in the U.S. is sex trafficking). In the U.S., most state human trafficking laws explicitly and directly address sexual exploitation, ignoring or vaguely covering other types of trafficking(myths of trafficking).
Post Racial What? Codes, Language & a New Paradigm
By john a. powell,
Why is it so hard to talk about race and why are these conversations so politically charged?
Historical roots notwithstanding, the Shirley Sherrod affair yet again points out that we’re addressing the wrong problem. President Obama offered that rationale in his now famous Philadelphia speech when he suggested that some of us were stuck in an old racial paradigm that no longer fits the national reality. He went further to insist the new paradigm was quickly moving to a post racial space where whites were less prejudice and could go beyond race to real problems like health care reform and economic recovery.
Read more in the Huffington Post.
You Cut, I Choose: Imagining a Brighter Racial Future
By Andrew Grant-Thomas,
Remember when some people said that Barack Obama’s election meant we had gone post-racial? It really hasn’t turned out that way.
In the last 20 months, we’ve heard the Attorney General of the United States say we’re a “nation of cowards” about race. We’ve seen a movement of people who still insist that Barack Obama wasn’t born in this country and therefore isn’t qualified to be president. We’ve seen white unemployment rates at their worst in almost three decades – and Latino and Black unemployment rates that blow the white rate away.
Read more on the Huffington Post.
Racial Aspects of Economy Are Significant for White House to Address
By john a. powell,
After an intense and shameful week of poorly dealing with ex-USDA worker Shirley Sherrod and issues of race, the country is left trying to make sense of where we are and why issues of race seem so hard and intractable. There have been many editorials and stories — many of them very thoughtful. There are questions of blame and many apologies. But what should we do to go forward?
There have been calls from both the left and the right for leadership on race from the White House. Professor Charles Ogletree at Harvard, who is a former teacher of President Obama; Wade Henderson, CEO of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights; and Ward Connerly, best known for his campaign against affirmative action, all have called for a national dialogue on race. But David Axelrod, speaking for the White House, made it clear that there is no interest in even considering that, or any other direct engagement on the matter of race. Axelrod’s rejection was as quick as the original commendation of Shirley Sherrod. So much for being more reflective on important matters.
Read more on the Huffington Post.
$10 million not enough to restore justice and dignity for Indigenous women in Canada
By Jamaal Bell,
After 600 Aboriginal women and girls go missing or are found murdered in Canada, the federal government decides to throw-a-bone and give $10 million dollars. In March, the Canadian Minister of Justice budgeted $10 million over two years to address the issue of murdered and missing women in Canada, however, they have yet to figure out how to use the money.
Many justice organizations such as Amnesty International and Native Women’s Association of Canada (NWAC) have made recommendations. Both organizations suggest that the $10 million is not enough to support the decades of injustice for Aboriginal women and girls.
NWAC said the $10 million cannot prompt real change in the lives of women who are experiencing violence, families who have never received justice, or appropriate counselling or support through victim services. NWAC have been collecting evidence, raising awareness, and developing policy directives to address the issue of missing and murdered Aboriginal women and girls since 2005.
Read more on the Huffington Post.
Senator Sherrod Brown Don’t Fear the Opposition Support the DREAM Act
My letter to Senator Sherrod Brown to support the DREAM Act.
A few months ago Senator Sherrod Brown conducted an interview with Kathleen Wells for my online publication Race-Talk.org. We really appreciated his time to discuss critical labor and economic issues we are dealing with today. From the interview, are readers were impressed with his avocation for social justice.
But many people in Ohio are urging you, Senator Brown, to co-sponsor the DREAM Act. This is your opportunity to stand-up for education and to give undocumented youth an opportunity for an American education and a path to citizenship. To back this law requires courage and based on the interview you gave Race-Talk, courage seems part of your DNA. Well, I hope you show your courage to the people of Ohio.
Mass Incarceration: A Destroyer of People of Color and their Communities
By Jamaal Bell,
Dear Obama Administration, instead of having our Drug Czar focus onaddiction recovery and prevention programs, how about changing the policy of our racialized criminal justice system that has used the “War on Drugs” policy to put more Black males in the criminal justice system than slavery in 1850?
Around this time last year, the Obama Administration’s Drug Czar, Gil Kerlikowske said he wants to banish the idea that the U.S. is fighting “a war on drugs,” which is a move that favors treatment over mass incarceration. While this approach is being taken, more than 60% of the people in prison are now racial and ethnic minorities.